Remarks by Saul Bellow to Padgett Powell's
Graduate Class in Fiction Writing at the University of Florida,
Gainesville,
February 21, 1992

Transcribed by Andrew Gordon

Saul Bellow was invited to the University
of Florida in February 1992 to participate in the annual
Writers' Festival. The arrangements were made by the poet
William Logan, the Director of the Creative Writing Program
in the Department of English, and by the novelist Padgett
Powell, who also teaches in the Creative Writing Program.
Bellow and his wife Janice Friedman flew from Chicago to
Gainesville, Florida on February 20, 1992 and returned two
days later. The evening of February 21, he gave a reading
from Humboldt's Gift (Charlie Citrine visits Humboldt and
Kathleen in their "rural slum") to an appreciative
crowd of 900 in the University Auditorium and then attended
a reception in his honor at Kate's Fish Camp, a colorful
local hangout for writers.

For one hour on the morning of February 21,
Bellow answered questions posed by graduate students and
faculty. He was casually dressed in work pants and jacket
but no tie. He stood at the head of a seminar table in a
crowded room and seemed in a fine mood, relaxed but sharp
and witty, thinking on his feet. He concluded the session by
quoting the divine Schwarzenegger as the Terminator: "Hasta
la vista, baby!"

Afterwards, congratulated on the honesty and
cogency of his responses, he said, "It never comes out
the same way twice." The following remarks are based on
my handwritten notes, not on a tape recording. There are
thus some elisions in Bellow's responses, and I condensed
the questions, which were often much more roundabout. I have
tried, however, to be as faithful as possible to Bellow's
specific wording and colorful turn of phrase. Bellow refers
to Diderot in his first answer because Padgett Powell's
creative writing students had been reading Diderot.

Question: In our creative
writing course, we've been studying two kinds of fiction:
realist fiction vs. writerly or postmodern. Which do you
think a writer should choose?

Bellow: I think the first
thing to do is to locate your soul and find out what it has
to suggest. This other thing is irrelevant. The farther you
get away from the promptings of your soul, the more trouble
you're in. Don't adopt any device which doesn't suit your
deepest, own needs. You can be sure Diderot did not settle
for any less. He is the kind of person he is: bubbling over,
an eighteenth-century French intellectual with a tear in
his eye.

Literature is not like two designs, as if
you're shopping for wallpaper. People hunt around and find
their own devices. The history of literature is not just
what people have come up with but also the history of what
they've become bored with. Some ages are more susceptible to
boredom than others.

My own rule is to choose the necessary and
set aside the superfluous.

Question: Was there a
day when you found your own voice as a writer?

Bellow: I can fix on some
points when this happened. You grow up in this hybrid
America and you're overcome by the idea of being a writer
because you've been inflamed by what you read. What was I
reading when I was young? Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, Dos
Passos, Dreiser, Faulkner, Joyce. I was an early Faulkner
fan. I bought his novels as they appeared in the 1930s; I
scrounged to buy them. You learn your trade by doing in your
own way what you thought these writers were doing.

Then I dried out. In 1949 I was in Paris on
a grant. I was writing a novel that was to be the book after
The Victim. I was tied in knots and couldn't do it,
I don't know for what psychic reasons.

Every morning in Paris they would flush the
streets with water and divert the current with strips of
burlap. One morning I watched the current being diverted and
thought, "Why do I have to be tied down to this awful
thing which is killing me?" I felt released and wrote
the book that became Augie March. That was myself in
unrefined form--brown sugar. It was spilling out of me. I
was very excited I had found a language. There was the
excitement of discovering these things I had always known
but didn't know until I found a way of writing about them.

Question: How did you
get the idea to write Henderson the Rain King? Had
you been to Africa?

Bellow: I'd never been to
Africa when I wrote Henderson. During the Depression
I got the idea to study anthropology. Since the streets were
full of unemployed doctors and lawyers, it didn't matter
what you studied. I read a great deal of anthropology--
journals and reminiscences of travelers and
missionaries--and forgot it for years. Then it returned to
me in a comic form. I thought, what a lark you could have! I
attached it to a mad millionaire I had met in the Hudson
Valley, and we were off.

Question: How much do
you plan your novels in advance?

Bellow: Occasionally I get
an idea for a terrific story but then I never write it.
Anybody can have an idea; that's superfluous. What does
matter is the things that haunt you for years and you build
on them until you're ready to write them.

Question: Are you ever
comfortable with one form or do you like to shift around?

Bellow: I like to be guided
by some considerations I don't really understand. I prefer
those. I can trust those. They're grounded in myself.

I never did go for "technique as
discovery"--that whole slogan.

My first book was my B.A. as a writer, my
second my Ph.D. Then I turned my back on that stuff and
never wrote that way again.

Question: What have
you read lately that you would recommend?

Bellow: I do read a great
deal and I shop around. I can tell after a paragraph or two
whether the writing will excite me. If not, I just close the
door on it. Life isn't getting any longer and you don't want
to waste your time. You want the necessary.

Here's some fiction I liked recently:

Robert Graves Antigua James Hogg Confessions of a Justified Sinner Christina Stead The Little Hotel Danilo Kis A Tomb for Boris Davidovich Andre Sinyavsky The Icicle

And some nonfiction:

Alexander Wat Memoirs Betty Howland Blue in Chicago

If these things don't turn you on, you know
what to think of my taste!

Question: What do you
think of articles deploring current American fiction, and
what do you think of the state of writing now?

Bellow: Yes, it's true,
things could be better--they could be a lot better.

Tom Wolfe is a very ingenious writer of his
sort. He's a journalist. They seldom are the very best of
writers because of their relation to a mass public which
demands billboards. Bonfire of the Vanities seems
like a brave book. But you're looking at one billboard after
another--it's like driving down a highway. You don't meet
the human substance of the characters.

It's true life is running a lot thinner now.
I grew up among immigrants of all kinds in the city of
Chicago. They had not yet been pressed into shape by the
forces of modern life. Maybe there's no character to look at
anymore--that that's just an illusion inherited from the
past. Yet one can't help but be convinced that a human being
is a profoundly mysterious entity-- and to label him as this
or that--it can't be so.

I can read Beckett with pleasure. But then I
say, "This is only one kind of description of what
human beings are, and it's offered to people who are
different from those described." It's a very curious
and elegant trick, but it is a trick. Sometimes people tell
the truth of a single mood but it's only one mood. Have we
begun an idolatry of mood?

People understand Ecclesiastes in the Bible
as well as they understand Beckett.

Question: In a speech
at Bennington in 1987, you referred to the need to return to
"purest human consciousness." What did you mean by
that?

Bellow: Instead of saying "Read
my lips," I'd say, "Read my books!"

I know it's a frivolous answer, but these
things can't be done up so neatly. Writers fall into these
traps, like the one who said, "When I wrote it, only
God and I understood what I was saying, and now, God only
knows."

Question: What was the
genesis of The Bellarosa Connection? Did you meet
someone like the fat lady?

Bellow: We were having
dinner with some people in Vermont. The host told me a story
of a man brought over by Billy Rose--the man became a
manufacturer in New Jersey. That was all I knew --what James
would call the little gift, the donee. I remembered that,
after WW II, unlucky American ladies sorted out refugees
looking for a match. I knew some of those people. And I met
Billy Rose once or twice and knew one of his ghostwriters
when he had a daily column. The rest is a question of
embroidery. I didn't start with a fat lady.

Question: You used an
actual person in your novel?

Bellow: Billy Rose was
already nine-tenths fictionalized. He had done it himself.
He was a creature who had excreted a legend about himself.
Beneath it all was a sad little guy who was very unhappy
with himself. Blue. There are many people of that kind.

Question: How has
winning the Nobel affected you, considering the supposed "curse"
of the prize on other writers?

Bellow: Well, poo, it's just
another prize. I've won other prizes. I knew Steinbeck well
and knew how the mantle of the prize paralyzed him. He
thought, "I'm just a guy from California." It
bothered him.

Writing is close to entertainment and sports
in this country. People who write about writers are very
much like sportswriters: "Now that the champion has the
title, will he be knocked out?"

Question: You knew
Isaac Bashevis Singer and translated his "Gimpel the
Fool." Would you say you were influenced by Singer?

Bellow: Not in the least! I
was already a formed writer when I translated Singer. I
don't see how anyone could be influenced by Singer, except
perhaps to become a vegetarian. He's sui generis.

Let's say that, living among immigrants, we
were subject to some of the same influences. But to be
influenced by Singer, you'd have to twist yourself into a
weird shape.

Question: Have any of
your fictional characters stuck with you?

Bellow: No, I don't really
think so. I can't think of any who did.

Question: Why did you
choose the particular narrator of The Bellarosa
Connection?

Bellow: I thought it a good
thing to write the story that way because it was a memory
story. As I grow older, I find I've always carried with me
things from the past as if they were absolutely
contemporary. Your soul is so open to things when you're
young, that you identify with them for life--subsequent
experience seems very shallow. I do reach for that, stories
told through a narrator--somebody trying to bring together
events of maturity with your earliest judgments, which had a
singular vividness and power.

Question: What is your
process of revision?

Bellow: Each book has its
own genesis. No two are quite alike. If I'm lucky, I can
write rapidly. I'm ready to spill the beans. I've been
collecting the beans for a long time. Groping lays you under
a curse--you're trying to do by trial and error what you
should be doing by revelation.

Question:Herzog
looks like it must have been a difficult book to write.

Bellow: I had a mental
scheme for Herzog -- all the passions stored up and
ready to discharge. The details I found very hard to manage,
and I had to rewrite. I don't really like that very much. I
like the spilling the beans part of writing better-- when
you have a very clear idea from the beginning. Other things
you find out about as you're writing.

Question: You don't
mean you knew the story entirely of Bellarosa when
you sat down to write?

Bellow: The story is like a
magnet which operates selectively--that is, it'll pick up
this or that you've thought about. Suddenly, the utility of
that particular thing is revealed to you by the story you're
about to write.

You have a close connection to people--it
means a great deal to you--it forms part of your mental
life. So why doesn't he see Sorella and Harry for twenty
years? Why put them in a mental warehouse? You put people
there and think of them always as permanent personnel in
your life. You assume there is an intimate connection. But
why doesn't he ever see them? If he loved them, then how
could he find it in his heart to check them in his locker
and lose the key? When he tries to find these people he
loves so much, they've all been filed away. If you live long
enough, you'll do this to people. You say, "Yes, I've
got them inside me."

Question: In Him
with His Foot in His Mouth, a character says, "Sometimes
I feel as if my existence is an insult." Should a
writer give offense? Is it his job? Is a fault of writing
unwillingness to offend or willingness to deliberately
offend?

Bellow: Of course, modern
man, especially in his liberal version, has become a very
odd creature. He cherishes a standard of ideal goodness for
himself--he's for all the good things and against all the
bad things. We're all like that now to a certain extent. We
identify with the good.

But it drives us into a certain absurdity.
Because that's not the way we make real judgments. It's a
kind of armor we put on so we enjoy the safety of our
goodness. An artist as artist doesn't have any ill will
toward anyone. He proceeds with a passion toward the thing
he does. But now we're very reluctant to injure or be
injured. Our chests are covered with medals saying, "I
am not a racist; I am not a sexist; I am not a misogynist.
I'm for all the good things." And our chests decorated
with these insignia, we go through life without thinking
about it anymore.

There's a kind of artificiality in conduct
now. People used to be closer to their natures. Or perhaps I
see it more because the ideological lines have been drawn
tighter now. We have the burden laid on us of understanding
a multitude of things we don't understand and are not
informed about. We're just not capable of making judgments.
The power to think about things is withering noticeably, now
more than ever.